YPN Ad Targeting

[KelliShaver]

I had a few photoshop tutorials up on my blog that got pretty good traffic, but my blog is pretty general and generic, so a few days ago, I decided to move the tutorials to their own subdomain so that I could properly optimize them and better target the ads.

So, I move things over, do some light SEO and set up YPN on the site, using their ad targeting to further refine things and for several days, the site is showing great Photoshop / design related ads.

So now I'm starting to get some traffic coming in, 2494 uniques and 5473 pageviews so far today. Out of curiosity, I log into YPN and it shows my daily earnings estimate for today at $8.40. It's too early yet to get CTRs or impressions. Great! I'm happy. I know this is small change compared to those of you who have been at this for a while, but I'm still quite new at this and this is a plain little site on a subdomain, so I'm pretty excited.

Then I go to the site and take a look at the ads its serving. They're not at all related to my content. It looks like they're either showing network ads or have picked up on some obscure keyword and are hitting on that.

I don't really understand why this is happening and why it didn't start happening until I started making a few bucks off of the ads. Any insight or thoughts would be appreciated.

[John]

Nice site, maybe you should think about getting it a domain of it's own.

[KelliShaver]

Thank you!

I've been wondering about that. If I'm going to do it, it would probably be best to do it now, rather than wait. On the other hand, they are my work and I do like having it directly associated with me, and the main site is for graphic design / web development services so is not entirely unrelated. In some ways, I think it adds credibility, which, admittedly, isn't something a subdomain normally screams at you. This is actually a bit of a delima (at least in my head it is).

[John]

If you want to monetize the site then I would say get a domain for it. You could still link to it from your personal site and keep the same design to keep the continuity. Then on your tutorial site you could link to your personal site.